The interaction between modality and negation in Turkish

Abstract

This paper investigates the scope interaction between modality and negation in Turkish. We observe that modals display a complex picture of scope interaction with negation: both possibility and necessity modals can have scope above or under negation on the one hand and both epistemic and root modals can take wide scope over or narrow scope under negation. This suggests that modals are interpreted in accordance with modal relations, bases, and sources closely associated with discourse and pragmatic factors, but not with lexical idiosyncrasies through which modals are classified as Modal1, Modal2. The study also presents empirical evidence for the idea that scope relations are determined by syntactic structure, indicating that complex grammatical operations are unnecessary to maintain the linear order of the sentence. This suggests that Turkish exhibits scope rigidity in syntax-semantics interface, a situation also noted for scope relations between NPIs and negation. For otherwise cases where scope relations are not read off syntactically, we offer LF movement of negation to a higher position, an operation which has already been introduced for independent grammatical phenomena such as NPI licensing. Hence, there is no need to postulate overt or covert head movement of modals to structurally higher positions to outscope negation.